Thursday, January 26, 2006

Things I didn't expect from the movie Crash, which I finally saw last night (spoiler warning):

That the audience would be expected to believe the best racial slurs Los Angelinos can come up with are "Chinese lady", "gangbanger", "Osama" and "rag head"

That amidst the most belabored direction in movie history, Brendan Fraser would actually stand out as a bad actor

That director Paul Haggis would not have gotten the memo about the creative exhaustion of ripping off the "royale with cheese" scene from Pulp Fiction

That after Ryan Phillipe reveals himself to be an armed cop, level-headed Larenz Tate would not realize that angrily yelling "I'll show you what I got in my pocket!" and whipping out a metal object was probably a bad idea

That incredibly self-conscious white people forced to reveal their subtle, latent racism will loudly shout out things like "He'll sell the keys to his gang-member friends!" and "I need a picture of me pinning a medal on... on a black man!"

That Jennifer Esposito, who looks like she was doing coke at Michael Ovitz's parties at age 11, would retain enough innocence at age 35 to be outraged when Don Cheadle, with whom she was just having sex, says "Mexican" instead of "half Salvadoran and half Puerto Rican"

During the denouement, that the sountrack would best any future attempts to parody the film by actually kicking in with the lyrics "You think you know everything..."

My father once did the same thing the Iranian woman in the movie does--put blanks in someone else's gun for their own good. In his case, this was an elderly aunt who seemed way too excited about the idea of killing an intruder. She called him weeks later, explaining that she took the gun to the garage to take some practice shots. He thought he was busted, but then she happily reported that the gun made a huge bang and kicked up a lot of dust.